How to Reduce High Blood Pressure Without Medication

In order to reduce blood pressure without taking medication, it's necessary to make dietary changes and other lifestyle adjustments. Discover the relationship between weight loss and blood pressure with help from a registered and licensed dietitian in this free video on high blood pressure and nutrition.

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Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Charlotte Lawson, a registered and licenses dietitian here in Tampa Bay, Florida. And I'm going to give you some diet tips on how to control and reduce your blood pressure to try to avoid and get off those medications. Well first we want to look at some dietary and lifestyle adjustments as well. Having an appropriate weight or having some weight loss has been proven to help lower that blood pressure. And incorporating a good, strong physical activity program is one way to get there. Exercise itself also helps with good cardiovascular health that again ultimately can help with lowering that blood pressure.So aiming for a healthy weight and increasing exercise are two great lifestyle changes. Also checking out the types of foods that we're eating. We want to eat nutrient dense not calorie dense foods to avoid those excessive calories that prove excess weight gain. Also look at your sodium intake. Sodium directly affects our blood pressure because every milligram of sodium we ingest we need about four molecules of water to keep our body at that equal homeostasis level. So you can imagine if we have a diet high in sodium we're probably carrying around a little bit of extra fluid. And that extra fluid increases our blood volume which then presses on our arterial walls and therefore increases our blood pressure. Sticking to about 2,400 milligrams of sodium per day is what is technically optimal. This is the same amount of sodium found in one teaspoon of salt. And again that's over the full day. A typical American is eating almost 5,000 to 7,000 milligrams of sodium. Way more then our body actually needs. So increase your physical activity, go for a moderate weight, try lower sodium foods. Definitely check the nutrition facts labels especially on those processed and packaged foods. And a well variety of your fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins and low fat dairy should overall help with just general health and then bringing that hypertension or high blood pressure down. I'm Charlotte and eat happy.